Dingwall

Town Hall and Museum

Dingwall lies in a strategically important position at the head of
the Cromarty Firth. Its name means "Parliament Field" in Old Norse, showing
that the town was an important centre as far back as the the arrival of the
Vikings in Scotland after 800AD.

For most of the next thousand years, Dingwall was the
administrative centre of a vast swathe of northern Scotland known as Ross,
Ross-shire and later
Ross & Cromarty.
Except for a series of enclaves forming
Cromartyshire this
extended east to the Black Isle and
Cromarty and, remarkably,
stretched to the west coast and beyond, to include
Lewis in the Western Isles.

This arrangement, which persisted until the creation of the Western
Isles Council in 1975, could hardly have led to responsive local government in
the days when roads were unknown in the interior of northern Scotland. And it
was probably little easier in the 1800s when it took a rail journey to
Kyle of Lochalsh
followed by a steamer to Stornoway to get to the far side of
the area for which Dingwall was county town.

Dingwall's far-flung importance is reflected in the town itself.
Much of the early development focused on a castle built in the 1200s, possibly
on the site of the fortress in which Macbeth was born in about 1010. The castle
was later rebuilt in stone by the Earl of Ross. It later fell into disuse and
then ruin, to be replaced by more modern trappings of power such as council
offices and the courthouse and police station.

In 1814 the River Conon and River Beauly were bridged south of
Dingwall and the town increasingly became the focus of inland communications
within northern Scotland, with roads built to
Tongue,Dornoch and
Lochcarron. The railway
arrived from Inverness in
1862, and from 1870 Dingwall was an important junction between the lines
heading west to Kyle and north to
Wick and
Thurso.

Dingwall also grew from its Norse beginnings to become a
significant port, complete with a harbour built by
Thomas Telford in about
1820. This project also involved turning the River Peffery into a canal to
ensure access to the harbour from the Cromarty Firth whatever the state of the
tide. Little evidence of Dingwall's maritime history now remains.

For much of the 1900s Dingwall's High Street and its congestion
were fixtures on the main A9 as it made its way north from
Inverness to
Wick. This all changed with the
building of the Cromarty Firth Bridge carrying the A9 well to the east of
Dingwall and clearing the town of its through traffic.

Today's Dingwall is a bustling market town. It benefitted from
growth following the building of the short-lived Invergordon aluminium smelter,
and from the Cromarty Firth's role in supporting the North Sea oil industry.
The High Street is now bypassed by local traffic, allowing better appreciation
of the find red stone buildings from which much of it is built.

Centrally placed in the High Street is Dingwall's most striking
building, the tolbooth. This has a tower that dates back to 1730, though the
wings that flank it were added in 1905. Today it houses the Dingwall Museum. At
the east end of the High Street and overlooked by the towering Free Church of
Scotland is Dingwall's attractive railway station, complete with The
Mallard, the green-painted pub on the main platform.